"I'll go."
Krian volunteered to lead a small squad out and draw the Rat Tide over.
Political Commissar Frank stopped him. "You're the Deputy Legion Commander. Charging into danger as bait isn't your job."
Krian had no answer, so the "honor" fell to his adjutant, Lordaeron.
Lordaeron led a lightly armored squad of a hundred down in baskets outside the wall. They hurried toward the outer edge of the defenses and made contact with the Rat Tide's vanguard.
Scattered gunshots rang out. The loose tide drew together. Through his spyglass, Krian saw Lordaeron's squad running ahead of a pointed mass of rats that chased them straight into the traps.
Ratfolk were timid creatures. A handful would never enter an obvious trap. But once they gathered in numbers, what little intelligence they had vanished. Like locusts massing into a plague, they were driven by instinct alone.
Their task done, Lordaeron and his men accelerated away from the tide. They reached the wall ahead of it without incident and climbed into the creaking baskets that hoisted them up.
Boom—
They were only halfway up when a roar sounded overhead.
Everyone in the basket looked up. A black cannonball traced a high arc and landed among the Rat Swarm five hundred meters away.
The nearest Ratfolk were sixty or seventy meters from where it struck. The shot could hardly have gone wider, but it gave the other gunners a point of reference.
By the time Lordaeron reached the top of the wall, the mechanisms of turning cannons were clattering all around him.
It was a mild, cool morning, if one ignored the Rat Tide spreading across the distance like a fungal carpet.
The rats crossed every trap along their route without slowing. Only the towering Northern Great Wall stopped them. Then they